Jenkins had been leading a four-man patrol
in a wooded area near the DMZ when he disappeared*...
The Pentagon says he deserted...
Relatives claim he was kidnapped and brainwashed.

UNCLE SAM SAYS POW DESERTED

More than 8,100 American troops
are missing-in-action from the Korean War.

An American soldier willfully running into the enemy's hands is about as believable as a sheep willfully running into the mouth of a wolf. But that's what Donald Rumsfeld**, US Secretary of Defence, expects the world to believe about a POW released from the hell-hole of Korea last week.

Uncle Sam is well aware that the Soviets and Chinese regularly kidnapped American soldiers*** in Korea and Vietnam and tortured and brainwashed them into saying they loved Big Brother. A remake of a 1962 movie on that very subject is set to open in theatres next week. ~ Jackie Jura

Cold war's lost GI to emerge at long last
Globe & Mail, Jul 8, 2004

Beijing — On a chilly winter night in 1965, at the peak of the Cold War, a young American soldier slipped across a military frontier and disappeared into the shadows of North Korea, a bizarre and secretive land of brainwashing and totalitarianism. A few weeks later, 24-year-old Charles Robert Jenkins reappeared on a North Korean propaganda broadcast. He said he had found his Shangri-La.

Was he a defector or a kidnapping victim? A traitor to his homeland, or an innocent dupe of psychological pressure tactics? The question is still fiercely debated, but until now the world has rarely glimpsed the jug-eared soldier from small-town North Carolina who had vanished into the world's most isolated state.

Tomorrow, at the age of 64, the exiled GI is finally coming in from the cold. He will be flown to Indonesia for a reunion with his Japanese wife, herself a victim of a kidnapping by North Korean agents in the 1970s. Foreign intrigue still swirls around Mr. Jenkins.

The Pentagon is determined to arrest him and prosecute him as an army deserter. Pyongyang continues to exploit him as a propaganda tool. Tokyo views him as a symbol of successful diplomacy, a useful figure for political benefit on the eve of parliamentary elections this weekend.

But perhaps the most fascinating question will be Mr. Jenkins's reaction to the modern world. For almost four decades, he has seen nothing of it. Subsisting in a grim Orwellian society of shortages and paranoia, he has been cut off from all foreign influences, a stranger to capitalism and globalism. When he arrives with his two North Korean-born daughters in Jakarta tomorrow, after a Japanese-chartered flight from Pyongyang, he will find himself in a sprawling metropolis of brightly lit skyscrapers and ultramodern office towers, a city of giant neon advertisements and massive traffic jams, its gleaming high-rises interspersed with slums and crumbling shacks. It will be a profound shock to a man who has spent almost all his entire adult life in a stagnant, state-controlled country where food and electricity are strictly rationed, Western influences are forbidden, the city streets are empty and dark, and official propaganda is the only permissible form of mass communication.

Mr. Jenkins grew up in the North Carolina town of Rich Square, population 1,000, about 135 kilometres northeast of Raleigh. One of seven children in an impoverished family, he was often mocked for his stutter and his failures at school, where he dropped out of the eighth grade. He used a B.B. gun to play soldier with his friends, pretending to fight the communists. At the age of 15, he lied about his age and joined the National Guard. Soon he had enlisted in the U.S. Army and was serving in South Korea with the 8th Cavalry.

On the night of Jan. 6, 1965, the young sergeant was leading a four-man patrol in a forested area on the southern boundary of the Demilitarized Zone that marks the ceasefire line between the two Koreas. Around 2:30 in the morning, he told his squad that he heard a suspicious noise. Heading off to investigate, he disappeared and never returned. Three weeks later, he began to surface in propaganda broadcasts on North Korean radio and loudspeakers at the border, where he urged his fellow American soldiers to join him in the Shangri-La of the new socialist state. In the 1980s, Mr. Jenkins appeared in a famed North Korean propaganda film, Nameless Heroes, a televised spy drama in which he played the villainous role of a sinister-looking U.S. intelligence agent called Mr. Kelton.

His existence remained almost unknown to the outside world until 2002, when Pyongyang made the shocking admission that it had kidnapped at least a dozen Japanese citizens. One of the victims was Hitomi Soga, who had married Mr. Jenkins in 1980. Two years earlier, the teenaged Ms. Soga had been abducted by North Korean spies on a small island off the northern coast of Japan's main island. She met the American soldier when she was a student in an English class he taught in Pyongyang. In 2002, after a diplomatic détente between Japan and North Korea, the Japanese woman was allowed to return to her homeland. But her husband refused to join her, fearing that the United States would extradite him and prosecute him for desertion.

After another summit between the Japanese and North Korean leaders this year, the two countries agreed that Mr. Jenkins and his wife would be allowed to reunite temporarily in Indonesia — a country carefully chosen because it does not have an extradition treaty with the United States. “The day that the four of us can hug each other is approaching, it's right in front of us. I am happy and relieved,” Ms. Soga, 45, told reporters in Tokyo this week. “I am worried about what comes after seeing them,” she added. “But I hope that in the end, the four of us can live together in Japan.” It is not clear how long the couple and their daughters, now 18 and 20, will be able to spend together, but the visit may stretch for weeks or months.

Supporters of Mr. Jenkins believe he was abducted in 1965 by North Korean soldiers. But the Pentagon, reportedly at the personal insistence of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld**, has refused to give a pardon to Mr. Jenkins, despite repeated requests from the Japanese government. It has cited a series of disputed letters that allegedly prove that he had planned to defect to North Korea.

* This is an exact renenactment of the opening scene of the 1962 movie Manchurian Candidate, starring Frank Sinatra, Janet Leigh, Jessica Langsbury and other big stars of the day, proving once again that the powers-that-be make movies - under the guise of fiction - to expose their past, present and future black operations.

** MOON HOAX DARK SIDE (Documented evidence uses archival footage and extensive interviews with Kubrick's widow, Christiane Kubrick, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and former and present-day U.S. government officials and luminaries such as Henry Kissinger, Lawrence Eagleberger, Al Haig and Donald Rumsfeld, to lay bare the lie of moon landing)

***Ewen Cameron & Psychic Driving. Michael Charron, Simon Fraser University
...The term "brainwashing" caught the eye of members of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). During the Korean War, 70% of the 7,190 American prisoners of war "either made confessions or signed petitions calling for an end to the American presence in Asia" (Gillmor, 1987, p. 78), and the CIA believed that the only possible explanation for this was that the Chinese had brainwashed the American prisoners...

In the Crosshairs of the Government:
Bobby Garwood's Ordeal as a Vietnam POW
On September 28, 1965, with only 10 days remaining on his tour in Vietnam, Marine private Bobby Garwood fell into enemy hands just north of Da Nang. For the next 14 years Garwood endured abuse that few of us can fathom. But it wasn't just the Viet Cong who kicked him around. Garwood was on a hit list -- his own government wanted him dead. Monika Jensen-Stevenson gives us the details in her gripping book, Spite House...

PEACENIK TO WARMONGER ("Why did we invade Iraq? Iraq has no nuclear weapons. North Korea has nuclear weapons and threatened to turn America into a sea of fire")

Accused army deserter to go to Japan. Guardian, Jul 17, 2004
....Jenkins is wanted in the United States on four charges, including desertion. He could face life in prison if convicted...In a bizarre twist, Jenkins' chances of going free appeared to get a boost after Japanese immigration authorities said Friday they had detained former world chess champion Bobby Fischer. Fischer has been wanted by U.S. authorities for attending a 1992 chess match in the former Yugoslavia in violation of international sanctions. He was caught earlier this week as he attempted to leave Japan for the Philippines using an invalid U.S. passport. Though Tokyo hasn't said what will happen to Fischer, handing him over could give Japan more leverage in the Jenkins case...Go to UNCLE SAM FINDS BOBBY FISCHER

An American GI who disappeared near Korea's Demilitarized Zone almost four decades ago and was accused of deserting and defecting to North Korea, emerged from the reclusive Stalinist state Friday for an unusual family reunion in Indonesia. Charles Jenkins, 64, flew to Jakarta in a plane provided by the Japanese government, to meet with Hitomi Soga, the Japanese-born wife he married in North Korea in 1980.

While Jenkins was allegedly in North Korea of his own volition, Soga was one of at least 13 Japanese citizens kidnapped during the 1970s and taken to the communist country to teach Japanese language and culture at Pyongyang's spy schools. Soga was kidnapped by North Korean agents in 1978. An 18-year-old student nurse at the time, she later met Jenkins when he taught her English in Pyongyang.

The fate of the missing Japanese remained a mystery until North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, in an unprecedented Sept. 2002 summit with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, admitted the abductions had taken place.

Tokyo made it clear that the well-being of its kidnapped citizens was of primary importance if relations between the two countries were to improve, and soon after the summit, Kim permitted Soga and four others surviving abductees to visit Japan. The homecoming was meant to be temporary, but Japan refused to allow them to return and began pressing Pyongyang to allow their families still in North Korea to join them.

But Jenkins chose to remain in North Korea, reportedly fearful that if he moved to Japan he would end up facing a U.S. court-martial for desertion. The couple's two daughters, 18 and 21, remained with him in Pyongyang.

The abductee issue has been an issue of massive public interest in Japan since Kim's 2002 admission, and the enforced separation of Soga and her family has received widespread media coverage. At another Kim-Koizumi meeting, last May, Kim agreed to allow Jenkins and his daughters to be reunited with Soga, if only temporarily. The family's future remains unclear.
Jakarta was chosen as a suitable venue, because Indonesia does not have an extradition treaty with the U.S.

Jenkins, a North Carolina native, was a 24-year-old sergeant with the U.S. Army's1st Cavalry Division when he went missing in January 1965. It was more than 11 years after the Korean War ended, leaving the peninsula divided along the 38th parallel, the world's most heavily-fortified frontier. Because hostilities had ended with an armistice rather than a peace agreement, the state of war effectively remained in force, and tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel were deployed to protect South Korea against its northern neighbor.

The military publication Stars and Stripes carried a wire service report on Jan. 19, 1965, which said Jenkins had been leading a four-man patrol in a wooded area near the DMZ when he disappeared. The Pentagon says he defected; relatives claim he may have been kidnapped and brainwashed, and have been petitioning President Bush to pardon him.

State Department spokesman Adam Ereli recently reiterated the U.S. view on the matter. "Mr. Jenkins is a deserter, which is a very serious crime," he told a press briefing last week. "It is our view that should circumstances permit, he should be placed in U.S. custody for adjudication of the crimes for which he's accused."

If Jenkins were ever to land in U.S. hands, he would likely be grilled on the fate of other Americans who went missing in Korea. Seven years ago, the Pentagon reached a significant agreement with the North Koreans to search for remains of the more than 8,100 American troops missing-in-action from the Korean War. At the time, the Pentagon also requested permission to interview American defectors in North Korea, but Pyongyang refused. At a May 1997 press briefing, Pentagon officials confirmed that six Americans had defected to North Korea in the 1960s-1980s. They were named as Jenkins, Pvt. Larry Allen Abshier (who defected in May 1962), Pfc. James Dreznock (Aug. 1962), Army Spc. Jerry Wayne Parrish (Dec. 1963), Pfc. Roy Chung (Jun. 1979) and Pfc. Joseph White (Aug. 1982.) Speaking at the press briefing, Colonel Larry Greer of the Defense Department's POW/MIA Affairs Office (DPMO) said four of the six were believed still to be alive, having been featured in "propaganda publications, magazines [and] films" over the years.

But there may yet another group of missing Americans alive in North Korea - prisoners of war. Reports have emerged over the years - from North Koreans who have defected to South Korea, among others - about Caucasian men seen working in the fields in collective farms in the North. In 1996, a DPMO analyst drew up a background report which said the office believed there could be a group of 10-15 possible American POWs in North Korea, captured during either the Korean or Vietnam War. Greer said during the press conference that the DPMO wanted to speak to the defectors to find out what they knew about the possibility of POWs. "Our interest in talking with the American defectors over there is very, very narrow, and that is to try to obtain information from them that they might know, might be able to shed some light on these reports that we see periodically about other Americans being held or living in North Korea," he said. Last July, in talks in Thailand, DPMO officers again asked North Korean officials for permission to talk to the U.S. defectors. It was again refused, the Pentagon said at the time.